A innovative take on the Japanese yurei genre…
Much has been made of Japanese horror cinema’s demise from the golden days of the late 1990s and early 2000s and seminal films by Nakata, Shimizu and Kurosawa. While this is very much an overstatement, there is little doubt that Japanese horror has struggled of late to produce work which adds something original and innovative to the genre. As such, Bamy is a refreshing and welcome addition to the genre, even if as some critics suggest that it transcends clearly defined genre boundaries.
Jun Tanaka’s directorial debut is on the surface a typical ghost (yūrei) film, a young man Ryota (Hironobu Yukinga) who is cursed with the ability to see ghosts. This ability positions Ryota as an outsider as well as playing havoc with his love life. In Japanese mythology, it is believed that human relations are predestined by a red string of fate which will connect lovers together forever, and while such relations might take detours, those connected to each other by the string can never be separated. This is explored in the earlier visually sumptuous Dolls by Takeshi Kitano (2002). In Bamy, the red string is replaced by a red umbrella which Fumiko (Hiromi Nakazato) sees falling to the ground when she is in an elevator going down from the 45th floor of a high-rise office building. The umbrella falls to the ground by the feet of Ryoto. As in the tale of the red string, Fumiko and Ryoto have been brought together by fate and are destined to be soul mates or twin souls. A year later, Ryoto moves in with Fumiko and they begin planning their wedding. However being haunted by ghosts is not conducive to a harmonious relationship and unable to cope with Ryoto’s strange behaviour, Fumiko’s throws him out of the small apartment they share. Serendipitously he then meets Sae Kimura (Misaki Tsuge) who also sees ghosts and begins a new and seemingly less complicated relationship. But this relationship is doomed to failure, as the red string draws Ryoko back to Fumiko.
Many reviewers of Bamy have highlighted the similarities of Bamy to the work of Kurosawa especially his dystopian Pulse (Kairo: 2001). This being said, Bamy needs to be appreciated in its own right rather than as a reworking or contemporary adaptation of Kurosawa’s film. While I appreciate extreme horror film, my preference is for the slower paced, more thoughtful chills of the understated supernatural horror that drew me to Japanese cinema in the first place. Bamy is an unsettling experience which draws the viewer in with dread and anticipation of what will happen next. The enigma of who the ghosts are and why they are stuck in-between the worlds of the living and the worlds of the dead is never resolved with one exception: a mother who died trying to rescue her young son from drowning but who drowned herself is stuck waiting at the spot of her death for the spirit of her son without realising that in fact her son survived.
Tanaka makes effective use of cutaways to empty space (pillow shots) found in many of the original cycle of J-Horror in order to manipulate and intensify the viewer’s emotional response. In narrative cinema, shots need motivation. They are purposeful. In J-Horror, shots are not dictated by narrative requirements but rather are an integral component of the linguistics of dread and the visual composition of horror raising a whole series of unanswerable questions: why is the space empty? is there a ghost that we can’t see in the space? what does it mean?. These empty spaces and unmotivated shots disrupt the narrative flow and break the seamless connection or suture between viewer and the viewed in a similar manner of the way in which the shadowy ghosts interrupt the relationship between Ryoko and Fumiko an inopportune moments including the scene in which they meet the wedding caterers to discuss the menu for their upcoming nuptials. In addition, the use of tilt shots, oblique angles, naturalistic lighting and bleak visual palate broken only by the repeated shots of the red umbrella, highlights the importance of human contact and relationships in the alienating landscape of postmodernity.
The awkwardness of the relationships between Ryoto and Fumiko and subsequently Ryoto and Sae is emphasised by the lack rather than the presence of passion for most of the film, until the very closing scene. Tanaka uses the format of the ghost story to comment on and critique the breakdown of social bonds in contemporary Japan leading to social and emotional isolation which has been linked to the growth of hikikomori (individuals who withdraw from society). The ending – which contains an intertextual visual reference to Memento-Mori (Kim Tae-yong & Min Kyo-dong, South Korea: 1999) – offers hope for transformation and change.
Bamy is not an out-and-out horror film and therefore demands a wider audience. It is certainly one of the most interesting and emotionally draining Japanese films that I have seen in quite a while.